Married in America [TV Series] (2002)

Synopsis
by Hal Erickson

Having spent over three decades following a group of British schoolchildren into their adulthood in his now-classic Seven Up film series, documentarian Michael Apted applied the same "over the years" technique to his ambitious cable-TV project Married in America. First presented as a five-hour A&E Network miniseries on June 17 and 20, 2002, the project chronicled the lives of nine American married couples, ranging from an interracial duo to a pair of "rebounders" whose household included several children and dependents from previous relationships. At the time of the film's original broadcast, most of the attention was focused on a lesbian couple who had been legally wed in Vermont -- and who, somewhat to the disappointment of tabloid correspondents, were arguably the most "conservative" duo in the bunch. Michael Apted planned to follow the couples depicted in Married in America throughout a ten-year period, with the second "episode" scheduled for the year 2004.